The midterms are over. Now what?

Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune

Meggie Ward holds daughter Ayden, 11 months, as son Hudson, 2, looks on as she prepares to cast her vote at the Sulzer Regional Library on Nov. 6, 2018. This year's midterm elections were anything but dull.

Meggie Ward holds daughter Ayden, 11 months, as son Hudson, 2, looks on as she prepares to cast her vote at the Sulzer Regional Library on Nov. 6, 2018. This year's midterm elections were anything but dull. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

No more exhortations to “Go Vote!” No more Facebook photos of wristbands and stickers proving “I Voted!”.

It’s over.

There were winners and losers, and depending on whose side you were on, you, too, feel like one or the other.

I’m writing this on Tuesday, before the results are in, when the news media are still talking of “game day” and “battlegrounds.” This is how we frame elections, as sporting events, as war. Neither term does justice to what happens on voting day.

Unlike a game, elections are contests over the most important of human questions: How should we live? How should we treat each other?

Unlike a war, the only ammunition in this fight is the peaceful, powerful thing we call a ballot.

For Americans disturbed by the tone and direction of the country under the current president, dismayed by the hatred flourishing in the land, the weeks leading up to this election have been especially nerve-wracking and exhilarating. Voting has seemed like the greatest hope for a cure.

“The turnout for early voting is AMAZING,” a friend recently posted on Facebook. “There is a line on both floors, up the stairs and almost out the door at the Edgewater Library.”

Before the results were in, there was no way to be sure how those people voted, but, to use a favorite pundits’ phrase, they were clearly energized.

So were voters in other neighborhoods. At park buildings, schools and retirement homes, people lined up for blocks, waited for an hour, or more.

“The weather sucks, but spirits are high!” one man reported from his long, chilly early voting line.

Midterm elections are often as dull as a winter sky. Not in 2018. I’ve never seen so many people work so hard to exercise their civic duty.

“About to get out of my comfort zone,” a college friend announced on Facebook early this week. “I don't like speaking Spanish over the phone and I don't (yet!) have a political vocabulary in Spanish. But off I go to make calls in Spanish to Get Out The Vote. I need to be able to face myself Weds morning with whatever the election outcomes are.”

Others put on their walking shoes and went knocking on doors.

“It’s hard to knock on strangers' doors,” says my friend Barbara, who went canvassing for a Democrat in DuPage County. “And walking around in the rain was not so fun.”

But she made the effort, and whenever the person who opened the door turned out to be a supporter of the other candidate, she simply said, “Thank you so much anyway. Have a good day.”

A few people were hostile, but most, even if they were on the other political side, were civil.

"I'm voting for the other guy,” one man told her, “but I really respect what you're doing."

“I thanked him deeply,” she said, “and I meant it.”

She wasn’t sure her efforts would change the course of the election. She knew her candidate might lose. But she never felt discouraged and vows she’ll do it again.

“I felt like a soldier in a crucial war,” she said.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a man I know who has been canvassing for weeks. When I ran into him, he said something that has stuck in my head:

“This is a time of purpose. We are on a mighty crusade.”

That’s as true today as it was on Tuesday or Monday or all the days before.

Crusades aren’t won or lost in a single battle. Win or lose, purpose doesn’t vanish.

It’s just coincidence — or is it? — that Wednesday, the day after the election, coincides with Diwali, the festival of lights widely celebrated in India and in some immigrant Chicago neighborhoods.

On Sunday, a friend who grew up in India brought me a Diwali candle, which she does every year. This year, noting that Diwali represents the triumph of light over darkness, she handed me the candle and said she hoped that the festival’s proximity to the election was a positive omen for the Democrats.

She had to acknowledge, though, that Diwali is bipartisan.

“So perhaps it is wiser,” she said, “to hope for the path forward to be lined with clarity, light and lightness.”

Clarity, light and lightness.

On Wednesday, whatever the election outcomes, I plan to light the Diwali candle and hope for all of those, because that’s what we have to do, win or lose.